It appears to be like like a serene snapshot from Ukraine’s battlefield: A bunch of armor-clad troopers huddled round a makeshift desk scattered with meals and taking part in playing cards. Some snicker or smoke, and one lounges on the bottom, smiling as he scrolls by his cellphone.
The {photograph} is not like others of the Ukrainian front which have rallied folks in Ukraine over the course of the struggle — there isn’t any cannon hearth, no troopers climbing out of trenches, no wounded fighters with faces contorted in ache.
Nonetheless, for the previous yr, the picture has been extensively shared on-line by Ukrainians and praised by authorities officers, who displayed it just lately within the capital’s main exhibition heart as a result of it has struck on the coronary heart of the Ukrainian identification wrestle attributable to Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The {photograph} — staged and brought in late 2023 by Émeric Lhuisset, a French photographer — reimagines a well-known Nineteenth-century portray of Cossacks based in central Ukraine, with present-day Ukrainian troopers standing in for the legendary horse-riding warriors. The troopers’ poses and expressions are the identical, although swords have been changed by machine weapons.
The subject material is on the coronary heart of a culture war between Russia and Ukraine that has intensified since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion nearly three years in the past, with Ukrainians seeking to reclaim and assert an identification that Russia says doesn’t exist.
The portray has been claimed by each Ukraine and Russia as a part of their heritages. It not solely depicts Cossacks, a people who each international locations view as their very own, but it surely was additionally made by Illia Repin, an artist born in what’s as we speak Ukraine however who did a lot of his work in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire.
It’s a cultural battle lengthy dominated by Russia. Essentially the most well-known model of the portray is displayed in St. Petersburg, whereas one other lesser-known model is in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine. Repin has been labeled Russian in international exhibitions, irritating Ukrainians who see him as considered one of their very own.
However Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art to reconsider this classification and relabel Repin as Ukrainian.
Along with his photographic reinterpretation, Mr. Lhuisset seeks to additional problem Russia’s narrative by drawing a direct line between the Cossacks, who at occasions resisted the rule of czarist Russia, and the present Ukrainian Military.
“You’ll be able to’t perceive this struggle should you don’t perceive the entire problem of cultural appropriation,” Mr. Lhuisset, 41, stated in a current interview in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. “It is a actual cultural struggle.”
The portray — “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey” — is acquainted to most Ukrainians, with reproductions adorning many household properties. It exhibits a bunch of Cossacks from an space straddling as we speak’s Zaporizhzhia area in southern Ukraine laughing heartily as they write a mocking reply to an ultimatum to give up from the sultan in 1676.
The Zaporizhzhia area is now partly underneath Russian occupation. The remainder has come underneath increasing Russian airstrikes in current months.
Though historians say the depicted scene most certainly by no means happened, the sense of defiance it conveys has resonated deeply in Ukraine.
“This portray was a component of self-identity formation for me,” stated Tetyana Osipova, 49, a Ukrainian servicewoman featured within the {photograph}. She recalled that her grandmother had stored a small copy “in a spot of honor” close to the Christian Orthodox icons of their house, the place it served as a reminder to “arise for your self.”
Mr. Lhuisset stated he first grasped the portray’s significance when he was in Kyiv in the course of the 2014 rebellion that ousted a pro-Kremlin president. He remembered seeing protesters holding placards with reproductions of the paintings to represent “their willingness to not give up, to not submit.”
Again in France, the portray slipped from his thoughts.
Till Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
Mr. Lhuisset was impressed by a information report a couple of Ukrainian border guard’s defiant and expletive-laden radio message to an oncoming Russian naval assault. The insulting reply instantly reminded him of the portray.
“For me, it was the Cossacks’ reply to the sultan,” he stated. “It appeared blindingly apparent.”
He determined to seize this spirit of defiance by recreating Repin’s portray in a contemporary setting. He spent months negotiating with the Ukrainian navy to get armed troops to pose for the {photograph} and to discover a protected place, north of Kyiv, to stage it. Some troopers got here straight from the entrance line, their mustachioed faces evoking the unruly Cossacks.
“They seemed like that they had stepped out of the portray!” stated Andrii Malyk, the press officer for Ukraine’s 112th Territorial Protection Brigade, which participated within the undertaking.
Mr. Lhuisset wished the {photograph} to be as near the portray as potential. He meticulously organized the 30 or so troopers, positioning their palms and asking them to freeze in bursts of hearty laughter to echo the power of the unique scene. Objects within the portray had been changed with fashionable equivalents: a slouch hat grew to become a helmet; a musket remodeled right into a rocket launcher; a mandolin was swapped for a transportable speaker.
A drone hovers within the sky, a nod to the plane with no crew which have develop into conspicuous on the battlefield.
Mr. Lhuisset launched the {photograph} just a few days in a while social media, and it was rapidly embraced by Ukrainian media and authorities officers as an emblem of the nation’s spirit of independence. Ukraine’s Protection Ministry posted the picture on the social media platform X with the caption: “Cossack blood flows in our veins.”
To Ukrainians, the {photograph} served as a way to reclaim a masterpiece that they are saying has lengthy been misattributed to Russia, regardless of its Ukrainian roots.
“Some folks consider the portray as Russian, not Ukrainian,” stated Eduard Lopuliak, a fight medic featured within the {photograph}. “It’s a solution to remind them it’s our cultural heritage, not Russia’s.”
Russia, for its half, says that Repin is a Russian painter and that each one of his work must be thought-about Russian.
The painter was born in present-day Ukraine and studied artwork there earlier than shifting to St. Petersburg to additional his profession. Oleksandra Kovalchuk, a deputy head of the Odesa Wonderful Arts Museum, stated that Repin retained robust ties to Ukraine by associates there and by supporting Ukrainian artists. To depict the Cossacks with authenticity, he traveled throughout the nation and labored carefully with native historians, she stated.
In some ways, the {photograph} was Ukraine’s reply to Russia’s personal reinterpretation of the portray. In 2017, the Russian painter Vassily Nesterenko, a Kremlin favourite, reimagined the Cossacks in modern Russian uniforms, in a piece titled, “A Letter to Russia’s Enemies.”
The undertaking additionally carries a extra pressing mission for Ukraine: serving to it rebuild a cultural heritage devastated by practically three years of struggle.
Russian bombings of museums and theaters have destroyed numerous Ukrainian cultural treasures. Moscow’s occupation forces have additionally looted establishments just like the Kherson Regional Art Museum in southern Ukraine, which misplaced practically its whole assortment.
To assist tackle the loss, Mr. Lhuisset traveled to Kyiv late final yr with a big print of his {photograph} and donated it to Alina Dotsenko, the museum’s director. “The Kherson museum as we speak is an empty constructing,” he stated. “To develop into a museum once more, it wants a brand new assortment.”
The {photograph} was displayed for a day within the Ukrainian Home, a serious cultural heart in Kyiv, alongside empty frames left from the theft in Kherson. Like most of Ukraine’s artworks, it was then saved in a protected and secret location to guard it from Russian assault. It is going to be transferred to Kherson when the museum reopens, which is virtually inconceivable as we speak as a result of it’s lower than a mile from the entrance line.
Mr. Malyk, the soldier, stated he hoped to go to the museum when the struggle was over to point out his youngsters the picture. Just like the portray, he stated, the {photograph} captures an essential second in Ukraine’s historical past.
“We hope it’s going to go down by generations,” he stated.
Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.
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